How to Run a Facebook Promoted Post Ad on Facebook

Running a Facebook Promoted post ad on Facebook is relatively straightforward. No bidding process is involved; instead, you pay a flat fee to push your post into a certain number of your fans’ News Feeds. The post organically reaches a certain number; then you’re paying for Facebook to show your post to people who may not have ordinarily seen your post in their News Feeds.

Promoted posts are good options for reengaging members of your current audience. To start a Promoted post, simply go to your Page and find the post you want to promote. Then follow these steps:

Click the Promote link below the post you want to promote.

A drop-down menu of budget options appears.

If the Promote link isn’t available, that means that you’ve never run a Facebook Ad before. You have to run an ad before you can enable this feature. At this writing, there’s no way to set up your billing without going through the process of running an ad.

Select your Audience by either clicking the radio button next to show the Promoted post to just People Who Like Your Page or People Who Like Your Page and Their Friends.

The People who like your page and their friends will cost more because you are showing your ad to more people.

The Budget drop-down menu shows you how many people you can reach and the cost of reaching that audience. At this writing, it costs less than a penny per person to push your post out. If you have a large Page, it can be expensive to reach the thousands of people you may not be reaching currently.

Select your budget (and subsequently how many people you will reach) from the drop-down menu.

(Optional) If necessary, change your payment method by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner and choosing Change Payment Method from the drop-down menu.

Click the blue Save button.

Your campaign has started. You can see data from the post itself while your campaign is running, as well as after the campaign, by going to the post and clicking the blue Promoted For button.

If you need to stop your Promoted post before the budget has been reached, you can click the gear icon in the bottom-left corner and choose Stop Promotion from the drop-down menu. Otherwise, your promotion will continue to run for three days or until the budget has been reached.

To see the number of people who saw your post because of your campaign, as well as the number of organic and viral views, click the People Reached link in the bottom-left corner of the post.